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A Castle for Timmy
© by Yianni Palos
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce “A Castle for Timmy”
or portions thereof in any form without the prior written permission of the author.

One

    I had to leave. I had to escape the city lights, the traffic, the noise, the people. I could see enraged eyes staring, pointing their fingers at me, and their toneless voices entering my brain like sharp harpoons. “You killed them!” A mixture of frustration, despair, and paranoia had crept into some dark corner of my mind, doubting and questioning my sorry existence. Why did you survive? Why did they have to die? Why didn’t you die with them? I was suffocating.
    Although I knew that my life had ended the very second after the accident, a strange reason that I could neither accept nor explain kept me breathing, living. I dared not to enter my neighborhood, my house. Everywhere I looked, everything I touched, reminded me of them – my wife, Sofia, and my darling little angel, Jennie.
    “Hush, Jennie. Stop bothering your daddy. Don’t you see he’s writing?”
    “Bussssie,” Jennie would say looking over her shoulders and burst into a delightful giggle. Then she would stealthily scramble over by my desk, head barely above it, blonde curls around her curious face, seaweed-green eyes scrutinizing. “What’s this? What are you writing? Why the leaves are green? Why the sun is shining? Why  . . . ?”
    Like a shell-less turtle, I went out the door not daring to return to my memories. I sat alone in my dark motel room, knees on the floor, elbows on the bed, praying. “Oh, Death! Merciless Death. Why them? Why not take me with them?” I never received an answer.
    I had to leave. With a suitcase and my laptop computer in my shoulder-bag, I arrived at the bus depot. I paid the cab driver, climbed on the bus, and took my seat. The passengers rushed to the windows, waved hands, yelled, laughed. ‘Come see us soon. Have a nice trip. Call. Write . . .’ I couldn’t stand their lively singsong voices, their happy, smiling faces, their animated gestures. I covered my ears with my hands, closed my eyes, and held my breath. They were alive and I, a walking corpse. The bus moved on. I breathed.
    Four hours later, the bus stopped. “Fifteen minutes,” the driver announced, and opened the doors. People rushed out of the bus and I followed. I purchased a cup of coffee at the cafeteria and walked outside to stretch my legs. I saw a man and a  woman in their thirties  sitting on a bench. A small boy sat silently between them. She had one hand around the boy’s shoulder, while she pushed back his fallen dark hair with the other. Their faces looked somber and lifeless. Their solemn expression reminded me of weathered portraits of times long ago. The man stood up and helped the woman on her feet. “Come, dear,” he said compassionately. “Time to move on.”
    Two hours later, the bus stopped again. Four passengers had arrived to their destination; the young couple with their son and I. The couple entered into a cab. “Come, Timmy,” said the young woman. Her voice was a soft murmur, tired. The boy turned his head over his shoulders and his big chestnut-brown eyes locked with mine. His face turned to a granite stone, his eyes glittered for a second or two, then his pursed lips softened to a melancholy smile, heaved a sigh, stepped in, and the cab drove away. The first time he had given me that same look was on the bus an hour before we had arrived.
    Disoriented, I looked about for a minute or so, and stepped into the pouring rain. Soaked to the bones and quivering, I entered the motel lobby, paid for a month in advance, and dragged my legs to my room – a bed, a couch, a desk, three chairs, a small kitchen, a bathroom. I needed no more. I took my clothes off and shut my eyes.
    I woke up. With my eyes still shut, I could feel the bright rays of the sun coming  through the window and warming my face. Half-heartedly, I went to the bathroom, washed my face, dressed, and took a stroll on the sandy beach. Any other time I would’ve looked at the beach, the immensity of the sea, the countless waves moving back and forth, their murmuring siren-like sounds, seagulls diving, yelping . . ., but not that day. That day I stared at my toes as my feet moved on the soft sand creating hollow sounding footfalls. I paused for some time and looked back at my footprints. Could I walk back on the steps that I had taken for the past month, I wondered,  and save them by skipping the first one? Futile, hopeless thoughts; the children of pain and despair, I mused.
    Unconsciously, I gazed at the waves of the last night’s storm. I was shocked by the modified state of my mind. I used to stare at the sea and visualize it as the life-giving sea, the nourisher and the nursery of life. I’d envisioned the waves the dressed up in foaming whitecaps waves as they ebbed and curved with grace and power, and steadily marched toward the shore smiling, giggling, laughing, chanting.
    “Oh, Mother Earth, oh, lover Earth, open your arms, oh, most desirable, we come to thee afresh. Let us kiss your feet, your sandy shores, caress you time and  again. Let us climb on your rocky shoulders; let us murmur our lullaby to thee in the serenity of your deep dark caverns.”
    Such high romantic emotions touched me no more. For Grief dressed in her long black dress knocked on my door, sliced my soft heart with her sharp knives and left me gazing at a world I had declined to acknowledge. It seemed as if those intoxicating, poetic days, years, had never been.
    My loss had granted me a different sight. I stared at the dark boundless sea; the widow maker sea, the orphan maker sea, the shark infested sea. I gazed at the parading waves;  waves with their keen devouring sounds, foamed with anger and passion, pushed and shoved the one in front of each, came one after the other toward the shore, the sharp rocks, the rough boulders.
    “Move out of our way, move!” they shouted their funereal song to the mountains. ”We come forth to devour everything in our path before yielding to our suicidal tendencies. Our final act; our demise.”    
    I gazed once again at the sandy beach. The cemetery of the waves, I thought.
    With both hands in my pockets, I moved on. In the far distance, I saw a grayish shadow moving like heat waves above the hot sand. As I approached closer, I saw the back of a child. He was sitting on the sand, hands moving in front of him. He was completely absorbed with what he was doing. I moved along.
    His voice stopped me. “Do you know what I am doing?”
    I turned. The boy with the young couple, I said to myself. His brown eyes stared at me. His fierce gaze raked my tall stature from head to toe, then his eyes dropped back on his enterprise. I saw wonder in those full of question eyes.
    Memories charged. ‘Why the leaves are green? Why the sun . . . ?’  I turned around and moved on.
    “I know who you are,” the boy said. “You are the man on the bus.”
    “Let me be, child,” I said indifferently, and hurried my steps.
    “I won’t let them take her away,” he shouted at me in a trembling voice. “I won’t!”
    It was dark when I returned to my room. I had stopped at the spot where the boy had been playing with his colorful plastic tools. The tides had washed away what the child had built. I could see a tall mound standing in the middle of a deeply cut trench, and smooth flat pebbles alongside of it. Everything had become an amorphous mass. Nature had reclaimed, as always, what was hers.
    I shut the curtains of the window to keep the sunshine out of my room and out of my lonesome existence. I could still hear the trembling cry of the boy. ‘I won’t let them take her away.’ I had to stop thinking. I had to go to sleep – my solitary escape from painful realities; my only sanctuary.
    The next day I avoided the little brown-eyed boy. When the night fell upon the earth, when the brave creatures of daylight went to sleep and the shy ones awakened, my steps took me to a small seaside restaurant. I ordered my dinner and a bottle of wine. Half-way through my meal, the child’s father, with whom I had exchanged a few words on the bus, walked in and, without hesitation, invited himself to my table. We nodded to each other and said nothing, as if we had nothing to talk about, as if we had exhausted all topics of conversation. The waiter put a wine glass on the table. I filled it. He looked at it for some time, then in a hoarse voice, “Salute,” he said . The glass was empty when he put it down. I said, “Salute,” and followed his example.
    He was a tall man in his upper thirties with dark hair, gentle, but sad face. His eyes looked un-focused, disheartened, and distant.
    “Steve,” he said extending his hand over the table.
    We shook hands. “Robert,” I said.
    His hand went to the glass. It hovered over it indecisively for a second, then put it in his coat pocket and handed me a Polaroid picture. I took it. I looked at it, turned it around, and looked at it again in a quizzical expression.
    “My son, Timmy, I believed he talked to you at the beach, asked me to give it to you. Timmy said that you’d know what it is.”
    I looked at the picture again. In the middle of it there was a tall crude structure faintly resembling a castle, with the same ditch and the pebbles I have seen the day before.
    I looked at Steve. “What is it? Do you know?”
    He shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t tell me.”
    I pushed the rest of my dinner aside. Somehow, I had lost my appetite. We finished the bottle in silence. For the past month my life had been a death march. Life is a deathtrap, but did he have to make it so obvious when he looked at me? Were my emotions so salient for the observer to see? He looked worse than I did. I almost smiled with that thought. From time to time a saddened gasp shook him, as though waves of grief and pain had run his being’s length. Empathy, I suppose, does wonders to people’s feelings. He asked no questions. He just sat there, stared at me from time to time and smiled sympathetically, as if to say, “Hey, hang in there. We all venture on the same boat of the living.”  What was his story? He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.


Two

    It was past midnight when I stepped into my room. I sat on my bed, placed the Polaroid picture under the lamppost on the side table, and looked at it carefully. The tall tower – sunny on one side, shady on the other. The left and right sides of the ditch were shady, while the middle sides and the flat pebbles were bathed in the sunlight. A late afternoon picture, I thought. Why did the child took it at this particular time? Why not earlier when everything bathed into the sunlight, or later on when shades devoured most of it? Why did he give me this particular picture?
    The boy’s message was, ‘He would know.’ Know what? I left the photo resting on the lamppost, lay flat on my bed and, without taking my clothes off, I closed my eyes.    When I woke up, the picture was staring at me, as if trying to tell me its secrets, the boy’s secrets. I took a shower, dressed, and walked toward the beach. Strangely enough, my steps took me where I’d seen the boy. Stranger yet, he was at the same spot building the same structure all over again.
    “I knew you’d come,” he said, softly. “Now you help me. You’ll help me build it, yes?” he asked, and looked at me for the first time, while his hand marched aimlessly above the sand structure. I saw big brown eyes; begging eyes.
    “A castle?” I asked.
    He nodded still staring at me. “Yes.”
    “And you want me to help you build it,” I said, and sat down.
    He shook his head vigorously. “Yes. You have to.”
    “Why?” I asked. “Why me? Why not your dad or mom?”
    The boy sat there, hooted his eyes, and didn’t respond for a few seconds. Suddenly, he sprang to his feet, wiped the sand from his knees and hands and, with arms hanging on his side, he slowly circled around me and the structure. Finally he stopped pacing. He looked at me, shook his head, his lips moved, as though talking to himself or daydreaming. His brown hair fell over his face. He swept it back, inched closer to me, and a cryptic smiled appeared on his face.
    “She said so!” he said, emphatically.
    I was losing my patience. “Who said what?”
    He kept looking searchingly into my eyes. “She said so in my dream – on the bus. She even told me your name.”
    I stood up. I was getting angry without even knowing why.
    “Listen, child,” I said. “I have no time for games.”
    His face turned into a mask of despair, then to anger, to hate. “Not a game,” he shouted at me, and pounded his foot on the sand. “You don’t understand, do you?”
    He closed his eyes, his mouth opened and formed and “o” and I, for an instant, was unsure whether he was inwardly ecstatic or gone to sleep.
    “Sit,” he said in a hushed tone of voice. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you my dream. Then you would know why you have to help me.”
    I sat on the top of the soft sand and listened to Timmy’s dream. By the time he had finished, tears had trickled down my cheeks, on my chin, and huge tear-droplets had landed on top of the thirsty sand. His dream was this:
    “It was white,” he began. “Everything was sparkling white - snow on the streets, on the rooftops, on the drooping branches of trees, and even on the very top of the brown telephone poles. White snow was on the ground as far as I could see. I looked around to see if people were building snowmen or kids to play with, but no one was out. I could see black and gray smoke coming out from tall chimneys.” He sighed. “So, I walked and walked and, from time to time, I looked back at my footprints on the snow. A sure way back home, I thought. My own footprints showing me the way home. I was so happy.” He giggled.
    “Then when I turned and looked ahead of me again the snow was gone. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers clumsily. “There were no more poles with funny hats, no more houses or streets, no more nothing. I was on the top of a downward rolling hill, and grass, grass everywhere. No bushes, no trees, no nothing but grass. Just red and gold grass swaying back and forth, now shining red, now gold, and now red and gold mixed together.
    “Then way, far away, I saw the smoke of a campfire as it rose up in the blue sky like silver dust. So I walked for ten minutes, twenty, an hour, I don’t know, and I saw her sitting in a rocking chair. She was looking at me and waving her hand for me to go and sit in the empty rocking chair next to her. She is very beautiful, I said to myself as we rocked back and forth. She was looking at the red and yellow flames. I snooped like a dog, and looked at her.”
    He paused for a few seconds and steadily studied my reaction, then he continued.
    “Oh, I guess, she was around my age, big green eyes, curly blonde hair about this long,” his hands touched his shoulders, “a pretty white dress with many flowers, all yellow and shining, white socks with fancy lacing, and black shoes with silver buckles.”
    I had to put my hands on my mouth to prevent me from screaming. Gasping, I sat there to hear the rest of his dream.
    “So, she moved her legs, the chair rocked, and we said nothing. Not a thing. Then she stopped and looked at me like this” (Timmy stared into my eyes with such intensity, as if wanting to touch my very soul), “then she said, “My daddy will help you. His name is Robert S. Longstern.”
    Unfazed by my shocked reaction, Timmy continued telling me his dream.
    “Help me?” I asked her.
    “Yes,” she said. “To build the castle on the sandy beach.” She took my hand in hers and I thought that she had the softest hands I ever touched. “You see, Timmy,” she said, “after you build the beautiful castle, and the deep canal round it, and place the guards for protection, and tall trees and bushes and grass and flowers, and all that, then you and my daddy will put your mommy in the castle, and she’ll be fine then. My daddy will help you. He knows everything. Okay?” she said. 
    “Okay,” I said.
    Then we talked some more, and she showed me how the castle should look like, and then, poof, she was gone just like that, and I woke up on the bus staring at you. Do you remember?”
    I nodded that I did.
    “Did she . . . she,” I stuttered, “ tell you her name?”
    “Mm-hm,” he said, and nodded. Breathlessly, I waited. “Jennie,” he whispered.
    My first impulse was to strike his face, to kick his body, to tear him apart limb by limb. My second was to stand up and kick his miserable pile to oblivion, and the third was to run, run, run. Run away from it all. But I didn’t do any of that. I just stood there crying, moaning, lamenting my loss. The boy said nothing. He just sat there staring at the endless waves, sighing. After a while he stood up.
    “Tomorrow,” he said gravely, as if he had absorbed my grief into his being, and then he was gone.   
    I had questioned my ifs and my doubts after he told me his dream, after my emotional outpour had ceased, after the boy was long gone. I stood there under the bright stars, blackness beyond, the lulling sounds of the waves, asking myself what if Timmy’s father told him my name? I crossed that if. I recalled our conversation at the restaurant. We hadn’t exchanged middle initials or last names. How would Timmy know Jennie’s curly blonde hair, the color of her eyes, her age? He couldn’t.
    I had never believed in angels or evil spirits coming down on earth and raging war with one another to save or to torment our souls. Neither I believed in ghosts floating about, nor aliens landing on some trailer park, or witches flying on broomsticks. Writers’ imagination have no boundaries. Timmy’s dream was not an imaginative story. It was real. It touched my aching heart, my soul. I believe that Timmy had entered in a world in which my Jennie invited him to give me her message.


Three   

The next morning, I was the one waiting for him to show up at the spot. It was autumn and the tourist season was over. The entire strip of the beach was ours to do as we like. I had with me a big cooler stuffed with sandwiches, chips , and soft drinks; enough for the both of us and a small group of boy scouts.
    We started our enterprise by selecting a site where no high tides would reach and destroy it. After that, we went back and forth to the sea, Timmy running and me trying to catch up with him. It was hard to say who was more enthusiastic about our undertaking.
    At the end of the day, he laid down, stretched his legs, folded his arms, and eased his head on them. A pair of bright eyes stared with such amazement at the three-feet tall sand castle – medieval style, gazing platforms, flat roofs here, steep there, balconies, windows, the beginning of spiral stairways, all solid, all appealing to Timmy’s gaze.
    Suddenly, “Gee! Dumb, dumb, dummy,” he said, slapped his forehead with his hand, and sprang to his feet. As he run, he yelled, “I’ll be right back.”
    I sat down with a Sprite in my hand, and a huge smile on my face staring at the castle, waiting for Timmy to come back, and remembering our long day. “No, no, no,” he would say looking at me sourly. “Don’t do it that way.” Each time I followed his instructions obediently. The end results were magnificent.
    The approaching tiny shadow became bigger, and there was Timmy carrying a roll of plastic, eight bamboo poles, a Polaroid camera, and a huge plastered smile on his face. He was panting like a rabbit when he put his palm up at my direction.
    “Give me a second to catch my breath,” he said gasping and heaving. “I’ll explain.”
    I smiled. “Have a Coke,” I recommended.
    He did. He rubbed its cool surface on his cheeks, his bare arms, then popped it open and gulped a few mouthfuls.
    “Hmm,” he said staring at the bottle and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Then his expression became all businesslike.  “We have to cover our castle around it and on top,” he started his explanation while looking up in the sky. “You see, it might rain, or the wind might pick up a storm and destroy our castle, or even racoons and other creatures might step on it.” He pointed the bamboo sticks and the plastic roll. “Do you see now?”
    I nodded. I certainly did.
    Timmy walked around the castle taking steps with his right foot, while dragging the other on the top of the sand. When he finished his foot-marking, he took the eight bamboo poles and handed them to me.
    “One goes here, the other here, and the other there, and like that, and then we put the plastic around them, tied it securely to the poles with this here string,” he took a roll of sting out of his pocket,  “and then the roof, and . . . and . . . and that’s all for now. But first, we have to take pictures.”
    He took the whole roll. His eyes sparkled like beacons in the night, and I believe mine did as well. I let out the biggest “Whoop” I could muster. His giggles became a contagious roaring laughter. My first one since . . .
    Early next morning I stopped at the mayors office and asked him if we could keep our structure enclosed.
    He shook his head. “Kids, eh?” he said, and let out a trailing laughter. “I have two of those myself.” His corpulent body jolted and rattled in his chair. “Sure,” he said when he calmed down. “Just don’t make a lot of mess, and no throwing garbage in the sand, eh?”
    I thanked him, shook his hand, but didn’t trust him. On the way over, I purchased a sleeping bag. Let the boy giggle. Let the whole world laugh with me and my silly idea sleeping next to our castle. Timmy’s castle had become my only purpose, my living reality.
    When I arrived at the site, Timmy had already removed its protective plastic and  bamboo sticks. There was a side to that little boy I’d never expected to see. All steel and anger, pacing around as edgy as a cat to a fight.
    “You are late!” he mumbled angrily.
    “Sorry, Timmy,” I said, and explained why I was late.
    The aggressive tautness of his face eased. “Okay,” he said, “but we have to finish it today. Mommy is getting worse.”
    No despair, no anger, and no sadness were attached to those words. Toneless, an as-a-matter-of-fact statement. How strong was he? I had wept in front of him, but I’d never seen him shed a tear. How could he endure it? Suddenly, it dawn to me. He believed; he actually believed he can cure the deteriorating health of his mother. He also believed that we could stop it, prevent it from further spreading, and eliminate the disease completely. I had become a believer of miracles.
     “Thank you, Timmy,” I murmured, mostly to myself.
    When the sun was high above our heads, we took a small break, munched sandwiches and potato ships, sipped our soft drinks, and admired our progress.   
    “That’s the forest for the bad and mean spirits,” he said, pointing the sticks and twigs behind the castle. “Our pebble-guards will capture them and bury them deep into the earth.”
     The rest of the landscape looked like a real forest with tall trees shading the green-seaweed grounds and the labyrinthine pathways, so his mommy (he’d spoken her name), can take her early morning and afternoon strolls.
    “See,” he said dreamily, “mommy can sit on this here balcony, admire the park, and warm her heart. Yes?”
    “Yes, Timmy.”
    He was so happy! I could see it in his sparkling eyes, in his ecstatic face. He hugged himself and rhythmically moved his body, as if holding his mommy in his arms and singing her a lullaby. So much boundless love and faith. I was very touched. He had become my teacher and I, his student.
    After stuffing ourselves, and occasionally spraying fine mist over our castle to prevent it from drying, we eagerly went back to our project. With a sharp knife, I carved the deep ditch around the castle. The walls of the pit went eight inches straight down, four inches flat, and straight up again. Finally, we placed our pebble-guardsmen on the inside edge of the pitfall.
    “How about a gate, Timmy?”
    He frowned, shook his head, “No gates,” he said.
    “Then we’re done?”
    Like a general before the big battle, he paced around the castle.
    “What is it, Timmy?”
    “Thinking.” He paused. “Something is missing. Something, something . . .” Suddenly he jumped up and down yelling. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”
    I’d never seen such a brilliant explosion on a face. Exploding stars, galaxies, the big bang, maybe? Maybe!
    “Don’t you see?” he implored. “We have to pour dark, nasty looking water in the bottom of the pit. Do you see now?”
    He rushed his steps toward a patch of brown seaweed and came back with an armload.
    “Wait, Timmy,” I said before he threw any seaweed in the ditch. “Let me work this out.” I closed my eyes to see better our whole project.
    “What?” he said in a soft murmur. “What is it?”
    It was my turn to say, “I’ve got it.” He looked at me. “The plastic, Timmy,” I said full of enthusiasm, “the plastic. That’ll solve our minor problem.”
    “Yes,” he stammered. Then, “Oh, yes!” he sang clapping his hands. “Great idea.”      When we were done, a wide band of plastic covered the bottom and both sides of our ditch. We had spread a two-inch-high bed of brown and green seaweed, placed some sharp stones here and there, and filled it up with seawater. It looked mean, foul and brown, and very dangerous. Had we finished? Not quite yet.
    Timmy put his hand in his pocket. His face became religiously somber. He took out a white cloth, knelt and unwrapped it ceremoniously. He was holding a tiny figure cloaked in a gold chain. He closed his eyes. A long minute ticked away in spiritual silence, then two. He touched the figure as gently as he could, kissed it, leaned foreword, and placed it on the spiral stairway.
    “Now Mommy’s cancer will go away,” he whispered, stood up on his heels, turned around, and walked away.
    I was speechless. I watched him go. He walked like a hunched old man with careful slow steps, his head down, and his hands and elbows went up and down to his face. I don’t know if he was crying or not. I know I did.
    Facing the sunset I walked on the beach. I paid no attention to the colorful hues of the sun, or to the sounds of gulls or waves. My mind was on Timmy. When later, much later on, I entered the restaurant, Timmy’s father was waiting for me. I sat across from him as he poured the wine in the glasses.
    “I have to ask you for a favor,” he said. He said that he was taking Elizabeth, Timmy’s mother, to the hospital for her monthly check-up, and if I didn’t mind, and if it’s not a big bother, can I look after Timmy while they’re gone?
    “Don’t worry, Steve. I’ll be delighted to look after Timmy.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “No bother?”
    “None whatsoever.”
    “We’ll be back the day after tomorrow.”
    “That’s fine.”
    “Thanks,” Steve said looking at the wine glasses filled to the rim. “Salute.”
    “Salute.”


Four

    The next morning Timmy’s trembling hand held on to mine as we waved our farewell to Steve and Elizabeth. The two days and nights when by very slowly. I could feel our tension rising, building up, readying itself to burst loose like a tightly coiled spring. Both of us were thinking the same thing – Elizabeth. We hardly spoke. We took tons of pictures of our castle, we ate there, we spend the nights there.
    Then the taxi arrived. Two bewildered, but radiating faces came out holding hands, looking around as if they were blinded by joyful tears. Then the woman moaned, “Timmy!” She knelt on the hard pavement and opened her arms. Timmy scrambled to her as though her arms were the safest shelter in the whole world.
    “Mommy!”
    Steve walked and stood next to me. He lovingly looked at the tightly embraced sight.
    “It happened.” he said. “It did.”
    “What?”
    “A miracle.”
    I secretly loved his rigid stature, his expressionless face, his awed monotonous voice.
    “No more cancer. Its gone. She is as healthy as she can be. Three different tests. All negative. “Miraculous,” the doctors said, and stared at the heavens. They couldn’t explain how. Sweet Mother of Christ! Look at them. . . Thanks for taking care of Timmy. My mouth’s so dry. Tonight at the restaurant . . . We’ll be there. Please, come.”
    “I won’t miss it. And Steve, I hope you’re buying. I’m starving.”
    I left them to their privacy and walked to my motel room. I had something to celebrate in my own privacy. I pulled open the heavy curtains and let the sunshine in my room. I opened my suitcase and took out the pictures that I had not dared to look for the past six weeks. I lay them on the bed one after the other, and for the next four hours, I looked into their smiling faces smiling at me. I smiled back.

    Later that night, I sat next to Timmy at the restaurant. He looked at me with his big brown eyes and took out a tin-framed Polaroid picture from his pocket.
    “That’s for you,” he said. He put his finger on my lips. “Ssssh!” he whispered conspiratorially. “It’s our secret.”
    “Not a word,” I promised.

    I still can feel Timmy’s little finger on my lips. ‘Ssssh! It’s our secret.’ I still have that tin-framed Polaroid picture on my desk; Timmy’s sand castle. Next to it, in a similar tin-framed picture, the beautiful faces of my wife Sofia and my little Jennie smiling at me.